Saturday, July 19, 2014

Controversial comedian, actor, and author George Denis
Patrick Carlin was born on May 12, 1937, in New York City. His mother, Mary, was
a secretary and devout Catholic, and his father, Patrick, was a national
advertising manager for the New York Sun. George was
raised by his mother, who left his father when he was two months old. He
attended parochial school and was an altar boy, to which he credited his avowed
atheism by the time he reached adulthood. At fifteen he’d had quite enough of
formal education and dropped out of school in the ninth grade. He also developed
a pattern of running away from home on a regular basis, thanks to a very
contentious relationship with his mother, and his enlisting in the U.S. Air
Force in 1954, at the age of seventeen, seemed like a good idea at the time. He
was stationed in Bossier City, Louisiana, trained as a radar technician, earned
his high-school equivalency, and moonlighted as a disc jockey on KJOE radio in
nearby Shreveport. On the downside, he also received three court-martials and
several disciplinary punishments, was declared an “unproductive airman,” and was
discharged in 1957.

While working at KXOL Radio in Forth Worth, Texas, George met
co-worker Jack Burns, and the two of them formed a comedy team, refining their
act at a coffeehouse called the Cellar before moving to Los Angeles in February
1960. Calling themselves “The Wright Brothers,” they hosted a morning show on
KDAY Radio in Hollywood, performed at West Coast coffeehouses at night, and
attracted the attention of the brilliant and highly controversial comedian Lenny
Bruce, whose influence opened the door for a Burns and Carlin appearance on Jack
Paar’s The Tonight Show. Not incidentally, it was also
in 1960 that George met Brenda Hosbrook while touring, and they were married in
1961. Their daughter, Kelly, was born in 1963.

Burns and Carlin went their separate ways, and George became
a popular guest on variety shows, most famously The Ed
Sullivan Show and The Tonight Show. In fact,
between appearances as a guest and as a guest host, George was booked on The Tonight Show 130 times during both the Jack Paar years
and the Johnny Carson decades. He sharpened his stand-up skills in Las Vegas as
well, perfecting such classic routines as “Al Sleet, the Hippie-Dippie
Weatherman” and “Stupid Disk Jockeys” and recording them in 1967 on his first
album, Take Offs and Put Ons.

As his career progressed, his style and the subject matter of
his routines became more and more unconventional. His short hair gave way to
long hair. His clean-shaven face began sporting a beard. His conservative suits
evolved into jeans and T-shirts. And on July 21, 1972, George was arrested at
Milwaukee’s Summerfest and charged with violating obscenity laws for his
landmark comedy routine, “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” The case
was ultimately dismissed. A similar Carlin routine broadcast on a New York City
FM station in 1973 resulted in the station being fined for broadcasting
“indecent but not obscene” material during the hours when children were most
likely to be listening.

The controversy, combined with George’s edgy, unconventional
brilliance, made him even more popular, and he was a natural host for the first
episode of the equally edgy and unconventional Saturday Night
Live in October 1975. By then he’d already unapologetically declared
himself a regular cocaine user, so it wasn’t surprising when, after an
unexpected five-year semihiatus from stand-up comedy during which he filmed the
first few of what would be fourteen HBO specials between 1977 and 2008, he
acknowledged that he’d suffered the first of three heart attacks.

George’s acting career took hold in the 1980s, launching an
impressive list of credits that included such feature films as Outrageous Fortune, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Bill and
Ted’s Bogus Journey, The Prince of Tides, Dogma, Jersey Girl, and Cars (a Disney/Pixar production in which Carlin is the voice
of Fillmore, a psychedelic VW microbus). He also provided the voice for the
children’s television favorite Thomas the Tank Engine and
Friends from 1991 until 1998 and appeared as “Mr. Conductor” on the PBS
Shining Time Station from 1991 until 1993. And in 1993
he launched twenty-seven episodes of a Fox sitcom, The George
Carlin Show.

Tragically, in 1997, Brenda Carlin, George’s wife of
thirty-eight years, died of liver cancer. In June 1998 George married Sally
Wade, a marriage that lasted the rest of his life. (In fact, his death occurred
two days before what would have been their tenth anniversary.)

George enjoyed long-standing status as a headliner in Las
Vegas. But in 2005 he was fired by the MGM Grand after an ugly, profane exchange
with his audience, and within a few weeks he checked himself into a rehab
facility for addictions to alcohol and Vicodin. He announced to his audience at
the Tachi Palace Casino in Lemoore, California, on February 1, 2006, that they
were witnessing his “first show back” after being hospitalized for heart failure
and pneumonia.

In mid-June 2008, George returned to his home in Los Angeles
after a reunion with performing stand-up at the Orleans Hotel and Casino in Las
Vegas. A week later, on June 22, he was admitted to St. John’s Health Center in
Santa Monica, complaining of chest pains. He died at 5:55 p.m. of heart failure that same day. At his request, his
body was cremated and his ashes were scattered, with no memorial or religious
services to mark his passing.

George was once asked what he was proudest of in his career.
He answered that it was the number of books he’d sold, totaling nearly a million
copies. Beginning in 1984, he wrote six books, the last two of which—Watch My Language and his autobiographical Last Words—were released posthumously.

From
Francine

I wish you could have seen the look of
shock on George’s face when he emerged from the tunnel and rediscovered that
there really is life after death after all.And when
he found his first wife, Brenda, waiting to greet him, he was stunned into a
long silence while he held her, after which I’m told he gaped at the hundreds of
spirits and animals who gathered for the reunion and said, “I’ll be damned.”
George is an excellent example of the fact that atheists are embraced on the
Other Side as surely as the most devoutly religious, and with his humor,
self-honesty, and misguided but honorable intentions, he tried to live a godly
lifetime, no matter what words he used to define it.

Once he spent time at the Scanning Machine
and in Orientation, all his memories came flooding back, not only of the life on
the Other Side to which he’d just returned, but also of the life that preceded
this most recent one—he was a black man in the mid-1800s, wrongly convicted of and executed for a murder he did not
commit, the murder of a white woman, which, it was later learned, was actually
committed by the presiding judge.It was
understandable that George arrived angry and rebellious against “the system,”
and it was brilliant of him to have charted a sense of humor that would allow
him to express his outrage through the power of laughter.He regrets that he found it difficult to distance himself from the
penetrating anger that drove his comedy, so that he could genuinely relax and
enjoy his success from time to time.He also
recognizes that he was conflicted about his success, loving the comfort it
afforded him, but also not wanting to get so comfortable that he’d lose his
edge, and it was in pursuit of that edge that he allowed himself to indulge in
his addiction to cocaine.He wants his daughter to
know how much he adores her, wishes he’d been the father she deserved, and is
intensely proud of her. He’s also grateful to his second wife, who he says was
more understanding and compassionate about the “baggage” he brought to their
marriage than he could ever repay.

His life at Home is blissfully happy, in
its own unique way.You need to remember that all of
us maintain the same basic personality traits throughout the eternity of our
spirits—the outgoing remain outgoing no matter how many times they incarnate and
return to the Other Side, the introspective remain innately introspective, the
humorless remain humorless, those with a sense of humor eternally have a sense
of humor, and so on.George is no exception.He loves spending time in the Hall of Records, researching
past and present charts of historically powerful men and women and entertaining
at large gatherings with his singularly insightful perspective on those who
experienced power on earth.He’s also very devoted to
study and meditation on the charts of his own lifetimes, intent on tracking the
onset of his avowed atheism in an effort to learn how he grew to be so loudly,
outspokenly wrong about the existence of God.He has
no plans to incarnate again.

Charismatic, debonair, and irresistibly handsome, Cary
Grant epitomized the words “leading man” and “movie star” for three decades,
more than earning his place among the American Film Institute’s greatest male
stars of all time.

He was an only child, born Archibald Alexander Leach on
January 18, 1904, in Horfield, Bristol, England. His father, Elias Leach, barely
made ends meet by pressing suits for a living, while his mother, Elsie, was a
vague, unhappy presence until she disappeared when Cary was nine years old.
Elias told his son that Elsie had gone away on a long holiday—somehow he decided
that being abandoned by his mother would be easier on a child than the truth
that she’d been institutionalized in a mental facility for a severe, crippling
depression. (In fact, Cary continued to believe the abandonment story until he
was in his thirties and found his mother in the asylum, where she’d been living
for all those years. It was a less than joyful reunion. His mother had no
interest in her wildly successful son or in getting to know him, and he never
saw her again, although he paid for her care for the rest of her life.)

Cary was expelled from school in 1918 and joined the Bob
Pender Stage Troupe, a comedy circus group that traveled throughout England,
where he learned stilt walking, pantomime, pratfalls, and comedic timing. The
troupe toured the United States in 1920, and when they were to return to Great
Britain, their young star elected to stay in America and work his way toward a
stage career. After some light comedies in St. Louis and finally on Broadway,
Archibald Leach traveled to Hollywood in 1931 and evolved from Cary Lockwood to
Cary Grant at the preference of Paramount Pictures, who eagerly put him under
contract. He was quickly cast in 1932’s Blonde Venus
as Marlene Dietrich’s leading man and was already headed for stardom when a
force field named Mae West selected him as her leading man in two of her most
successful films: She Done Him Wrong, which was
nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award in 1933, and I’m
No Angel, a huge box-office hit that rescued Paramount from bankruptcy.
Paramount went on to cast Cary in a string of mediocre movies, and in 1936 he
left the studio for a contract with Columbia Pictures, which promptly loaned him
out to Hal Roach for his first real comedy showcase, Topper.

While Cary was sharing the screen in the 1930s and 1940s with
some of Hollywood’s greatest actresses, including Katharine Hepburn, Rosalind
Russell, and Irene Dunne, he was devoting much of his off-screen time to the
first three of his five wives. In 1934 he married actress Virginia Cherrill. She
divorced him a year later, claiming that he hit her. In 1942 he married Barbara
Hutton, the insanely wealthy socialite who was heiress to both the Woolworth and
E. F. Hutton fortunes. Any accusations that Cary was only after her for her
money (Hollywood cynics nicknamed them “Cash and Cary”) were disproved when,
after their divorce in 1945, it was revealed that he’d signed a prenuptial
agreement waiving any claim to a single dime of her money. Cary and Barbara
Hutton remained friends for the rest of their lives, and he continued to treat
her son, Lance Reventlow, like a member of his own family. His next marriage was
to actress Betsy Drake, on Christmas Day, 1949. That marriage didn’t end until
August 14, 1962, despite Cary’s having fallen in love with Sophia Loren while
filming The Pride and the Passion with her in 1957.
Sophia was already very much in love with her future husband, Carlo Ponti, at
the time of the filming of The Pride and the
Passion.

These marriages took place, by the way, against persistent
rumors that Cary was either bisexual or homosexual, particularly in light of his
unapologetically being roommates with his great friend, actor Randolph Scott,
off and on for twelve years. He was well aware of the rumors and was quoted as
saying, “Look at it this way. I’ve always tried to dress well. I’ve had some
success in life. I’ve enjoyed my success, and I include in that success some
relationships with very special women. If someone wants to say I’m gay, what can
I do? I think it’s probably said about every man who’s been known to do well
with women. I don’t let that sort of thing bother me. What matters to me is that
I know who I am.”

In the meantime, on the professional front, Cary Grant also
teamed up for several films with director Alfred Hitchcock, who called Cary “the
only actor I ever loved in my whole life.” Their films together, which include
Suspicion (1941), Notorious
(1946), To Catch a Thief (1955), and North by Northwest (1959), are still considered classics, as
are so many of the more than seventy movies Cary made in his lifetime.

He was smart enough, and rebellious enough, to be the first
actor to form his own production company, Grantley Productions, in the
mid-1950s. This allowed him to control all aspects of his career, and the films
his company produced, distributed by Universal, included such successes as Operation Petticoat (1959), That Touch of
Mink (1962), and Charade (1963; with the
extraordinary Audrey Hepburn). His last movie, Walk, Don’t
Run, was shot in 1965. Thanks to Grantley Productions, Cary Grant
received a share of the gross profits for these films, and his estate when he
died was said to be worth approximately $60 million. It’s theorized, though,
that Cary’s politically unpopular decision to turn his back on the
well-established “studio system” and become an independent entity cost him the
two Academy Awards for which he was nominated.

Cary’s next marriage, at the end of his film career, was to
actress Dyan Cannon. They eloped to Las Vegas in 1965, and to his profound joy,
his only child, a daughter named Jennifer, was born on February 26, 1966. This
troubled marriage ended in a bitter, widely publicized divorce in 1968 and an
ongoing custody battle over Jennifer that continued well into the 1970s.

On April 11, 1981, Cary married his fifth and final wife, his
longtime friend and companion Barbara Harris, a British hotel publicist who was
forty-seven years younger than he. She traveled with him when, in the last years
of his life, he began touring the United States in a one-man show called A Conversation with Cary Grant. On the afternoon of November
29, 1986, he was preparing for an appearance in Davenport, Iowa, when he
suddenly seemed a bit confused and told his wife he needed to rest. When he
headed off to his dressing room, she realized something was very wrong and
called for an ambulance. He was pronounced dead at 11:22 p.m. in Davenport’s St. Luke’s Hospital of a massive
stroke.

Cary’s substantial fortune was divided between his wife,
Barbara, and his cherished daughter, Jennifer, who, in August 2008, gave birth
to her first child, a son she named Cary Benjamin Grant.

From
Francine

Laughter spread through the large crowd
that welcomed Cary to the Other Side, when he emerged from the tunnel and
announced with his trademark droll wit, “Well, that was interesting.” Alfred
Hitchcock was among the first to embrace him, along with his soul mate, a woman
named Rachel, who looks a great deal like Barbara Hutton, but with long braided
black hair and a very tall, ample body.Cary was
enormously introspective about his trip to the Scanning Machine, interested to
find out that he was angrier about his lifetime while he lived it than he was
aware of at the time. “I didn’t much care what people thought or said about me,
whether it was the studios or the fans.I knew exactly
who I was and who I wasn’t.What I did care about was
the astonishing number of purported experts on me and my life who couldn’t be
bothered to take the simple truth for an answer.I had
more than my share of faults, but lying wasn’t among them.” His life themes of
Aesthetic Pursuits and Experiencer worked both for him and against him, he
believes, making him a versatile, highly adventurous performer who had a
marvelous career, but was“for the most part, an
unfortunate choice for a husband.”

He couldn’t wait to return to his life on
the Other Side, to which those same themes seem to apply.He changes homes frequently—at any given moment he might be living
in a Greek Revival captain’s house on what corresponds to your northern Atlantic
coastline, a brownstone near the Towers where he goes to meditate, a simple tent
in the midst of the jungle animals he adores, or a lavish castle carved into the
rocky slopes of our Mount Everest.He delights in a
very busy social life, never missing an opportunity to gather with everyone from
actors and musicians to physicists and astronomers to former world leaders, all
of whom comment after socializing with him about his charming eagerness to
listen and learn, no matter what the subject.He
continues to act, particularly in a brilliant stage interpretation of
None but the Lonely Heart, which he performs with such
“volunteers” as Grace Kelly, Ingrid Bergman, Rock Hudson, Lee J. Cobb, Anthony
Quinn, and his great friends Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy.He’s also an avid golfer and is learning to play the cello, the
sound of which he’s always found soothing and “soul cleansing.”

His great passion at Home, though, is his
dedicated work with our many research teams determined to reverse global warming
on earth and infuse solutions to your diligent scientists, researchers, and
environmentalists on earth.All of us are deeply
concerned, but none more than Cary, who refuses to “stand by and do nothing
while my innocent grandson grows up on an endangered planet.”

His visits to earth, by the way, are
devoted entirely to his grandson, and he promises, “I’ll be watching over that
precious boy all his life.”

Marilyn
Monroe defined the terms “movie star” and “sex symbol” during her lifetime, and
she continues to define them now, nearly five decades after her controversial
death. She was shamelessly sensual but fragile, intelligent but helpless,
ambitious but difficult, an icon of perfection but deeply flawed.

On June 1, 1926, in Los Angeles, California, Gladys Monroe
Baker gave birth to a daughter she named Norma Jeane. Norma Jeane’s paternity
has never been authenticated, although Gladys’s estranged husband, Edward
Mortenson, is listed on the birth certificate. Whoever fathered Norma Jeane
Baker, though, was definitely nowhere to be found, nor was Gladys on a regular
basis. Mentally unstable and institutionalized from time to time, Gladys handed
over most of the care of her daughter to a succession of orphanages, guardians,
and foster homes, in some of which she was reportedly abused.

In June 1942, when she was sixteen, Norma Jeane married James
Dougherty, a marriage arranged to keep her out of yet another foster home.
Dougherty enlisted in the Merchant Marines in 1943 and during World War II left
his young wife in the care of his mother. Norma Jeane was hired by a munitions
factory, where she was photographed for an article in Yank magazine. As a result of that photograph, she was
signed by the Blue Book Modeling Agency and, with its encouragement, transformed
herself from a brunette to a blonde and became a successful model who began to
dream of an acting career. Dougherty demanded, when he returned home, that she
choose between their marriage and her career. She chose her career and divorced
James Dougherty in 1946.

Norma Jeane quickly captured the attention of Ben Lyon, a
Twentieth Century Fox executive, who signed her to a six-month contract and
changed her name to Marilyn Monroe. After a couple of nonstellar film
appearances in 1947, Marilyn was released from her obligations to Fox and
returned to modeling until 1948, when she signed a six-month contract with
Columbia Pictures.

It was her appearance in a Marx Brothers film called Love Happy in 1949 that attracted a successful agent named
Johnny Hyde, who promptly signed her and was instrumental in landing critically
acclaimed roles for her in John Huston’s The Asphalt
Jungle and Joseph Mankiewicz’s All About Eve.
Hyde is also credited with negotiating Marilyn’s seven-year contract at
Twentieth Century Fox in 1950.

Her film career was well on its way by the end of 1952
despite the stage fright that had begun to plague her, causing her to hide in
her dressing room for hours while the rest of the cast and crew waited
impatiently for her. She graced the cover of the first issue of Playboy in 1953, the same year in which she was suspended
from her Fox contract for failing to appear for work and in which she met
baseball superstar Joe DiMaggio, whom she married on January 14, 1954, a
marriage that lasted less than a year.

Displeased with the quality of roles being offered to her by
Fox and with the relatively small salary, Marilyn broke away from the studio and
moved to New York, where she studied acting at the famed Lee Strasberg Actors
Studio and began dating playwright Arthur Miller, whom she married on June 29,
1956. Her severe stage fright continued to plague her throughout her acting
classes, but she was also recognized as a genuinely gifted standout. In the
meantime, her film The Seven Year Itch was released to
enormous success, and she re-signed with Twentieth Century Fox with a much more
lucrative nonexclusive contract.

Under her new contract Marilyn starred in Bus Stop and The Prince and the
Showgirl with critical acclaim and relatively few problems. She took a
year off to focus on her marriage to Arthur Miller, but she sadly suffered a
miscarriage in August 1957. She returned to Hollywood in 1958 to shoot Billy
Wilder’s Some Like It Hot, costarring Jack Lemmon and
Tony Curtis, during which her compulsive tardiness, hostile refusal to take
direction from Wilder, and general obstructive behavior contributed to her
growing reputation for being difficult to work with. But the film was a huge
box-office success, received five Academy Award nominations, and earned Marilyn
the Golden Globe Best Actress Award.

By the late 1950s Marilyn’s health was in a conspicuous
decline, due largely to a growing dependence on prescription medication,
particularly sleeping pills to battle her chronic insomnia, and the strains on
her marriage were becoming more and more apparent.

Arthur Miller had written a screenplay called The Misfits, which began filming in July 1960 with Marilyn,
Clark Gable, and Montgomery Clift, directed by John Huston. It was to become
Marilyn Monroe’s last completed film. She was often too ill and too anxious to
perform, her fragile health further compromised by a steady stream of
prescription medications and alcohol. A month after filming began she was
hospitalized for ten days with an undisclosed illness, and when she returned to
the set her open hostility toward her husband was a recurring obstacle. Clark
Gable became ill while shooting The Misfits as well,
and less than ten days after filming was completed, Marilyn Monroe and Arthur
Miller officially separated and Clark Gable was dead from a heart attack.

Marilyn’s addictions to alcohol and prescription drugs
escalated following the lackluster box-office performance of The Misfits, and in February 1961, once her divorce from
Arthur Miller was finalized, she checked into a psychiatric clinic. For the
remainder of 1961 she battled a series of mental and physical health challenges,
with her former husband and still loyal friend Joe DiMaggio by her side.

In 1962 she started filming Something’s
Got to Give, but her repeated failure to report to work forced Twentieth
Century Fox to fire her and file a lawsuit against her. On May 19, 1962, she
gave an unforgettably breathy, voluptuous, and somewhat slurred performance of
“Happy Birthday” at the birthday celebration for President John Kennedy, with
whom she was later reported to have had an affair. She launched into a busy
series of interviews, photo shoots, and meetings about future projects. She and
Fox resolved their dispute, and they renewed her contract. And Something’s Got to Give was scheduled to resume filming in
the early fall of 1962.

But at 4:25 a.m. on the morning
of August 5, 1962, Marilyn’s psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, placed an
emergency call to report that she’d been found dead in her small Brentwood,
California, house. She was just thirty-six years old. Following an autopsy, the
cause of death was listed as “acute barbiturate poisoning—probable suicide.”
Even now, nearly fifty years later, the circumstances surrounding her death
continue to create any number of theories and allegations, including homicide.
Marilyn Monroe was laid to rest on August 8, 1962, in the Corridor of Memories
at Westwood Memorial Park, leaving behind a legacy of thirty films and an iconic
standard of beauty and glamour at their most vulnerable that will never be
duplicated.

From
Sylvia

Several years after Marilyn’s death I was asked by a
nationally syndicated television show to visit her house with a film crew to see
if she would communicate with me. A condition of filming on their part was that
I wouldn’t be allowed inside the house or even that close to it—just inside the
gate was as far as we could go. A condition on my part was, “No promises.” There
are no spirits or ghosts who can be counted on to come when I call them, and I
hadn’t even established yet whether Marilyn had made it to the Other Side or if
she was still earthbound. For all I knew we could end up with a lot of footage
of me standing in front of a house staring mindlessly into the camera without a
peep out of Marilyn.

I admit it, I’d done no research on her life before I
arrived, so I didn’t think much about being introduced to a lovely older
gentleman named James Dougherty until I was told he was her first husband. He
was quick to clarify that he’d never been married to Marilyn Monroe; he was
married to the young (pre-Marilyn) Norma Jeane Baker. He spoke of her with deep
affection, and her death had touched him deeply.

As soon as we’d arrived as close to the house as we were
allowed to get, a brief Latin phrase came to me. I pronounced it as best I
could, and when I saw him staring at me, I explained, “It’s in the tiles above
the entryway. It means something like ‘Everyone is welcome here.’”

He asked how I knew about that, since I’d never been to the
house before, and I told him. “Marilyn’s telling me.”

It was a nice surprise. She was definitely on the Other Side,
she definitely had a lot to say, and she was ready to say it to me without
preferring to talk through Francine. I can’t judge or comment on its accuracy.
I’ll just report what she passed along and leave the rest to you.

She was adamant about the fact that she did not commit
suicide. She described being alone in her bedroom that night, taking too many
pills and making some blurry phone calls. But she had a clear memory of a man
coming in and sticking a needle of what she believed to be Nembutol into her
heart.

She never stopped loving Joe DiMaggio, and one of the sources
of depression that plagued her in her later years was the fear that, because she
confided so much in him about things she undoubtedly wasn’t supposed to know,
which she’d written in a red journal or diary, loving her might have brought him
more pain and potential danger than joy. She visited him often from the Other
Side, particularly when he slept, and she was already determined to be the first
to greet him when he came Home.

Then she was gone. Even in that brief encounter, I was
pleasantly surprised at how much I liked her and the depth of her sincerity.

From
Francine

Marilyn was indeed the first to welcome
Joe DiMaggio Home.They lead very quiet separate lives
here, but they also spend a lot of time together walking on the beach.Marilyn is a voracious reader and can often be found studying
the great literary classics in the Hall of Records.

Like everyone else on the Other Side, she
looks back on her most recent lifetime with increasing clarity.She knows she was bipolar.She knows that
she was at her most comfortable when she was acting—pretending to be someone
else.She knows that if she’d lived a long life, she
would never have been the icon she’s become.She just
wants those who try to emulate her not to fall into the same trap she did, the
excess that comes with fame.People stop saying no to
you.You stop saying no to yourself.And before long you’ve forgotten what a loving word “no” can
be.

Even as
a child in Catholic school I was frustrated by how vague everyone was about this
“life after death” thing. There seemed to be general agreement that our spirits
survive after our mortal bodies give out. It was the “and then what?” part that
inspired a lot of throat clearing and hazy, halfhearted answers; I often got the
feeling it was the one question the nuns et al. were hoping no one would ask.
From what I could piece together, when we die, some sort of tunnel apparently
drops down from the sky like a big sparkling megaphone to kind of inhale our
souls up to heaven. Alternately, we were offered a lot of lovely imagery about
our souls floating away from our dead bodies and disappearing beyond the clouds.
But after one or the other or something else happened, our immortal souls either
ended up in heaven, which looked like who knows what, to live happily ever after
with God, doing who knows what, or we were sent to hell for an eternity of fiery
damnation—by a God who was always described as all-loving and all-forgiving.

Looking back, it’s no surprise that I wasn’t satisfied with
those answers, or lack of them, particularly the ones that made no sense. But
finally, between Francine’s generous, articulate expertise, a lifetime of study,
including a degree in theology, and my own near-death experience at the age of
forty-two, I learned the truth about “and then what?” and it’s far more sacred
and exquisite than anything my imagination could have created.

There is a very real tunnel, it turns out, and it doesn’t
drop down from the sky when our bodies die. Instead, it rises up from our own
etheric substance, or energy field, angles across our body at about a
twenty-degree angle, and delivers us to the Other Side, which is actually just
three feet above our ground level, but in another dimension whose vibrational
frequency is much higher than ours. It’s a perfect mirror image of the natural
topography of our planet—our continents, our oceans, our mountains, our rivers,
our forests, our deserts, our coastlines, every single feature of earth as it
once existed before pollution, erosion, and human destruction came along.
Because time doesn’t exist on the Other Side, nothing ages, nothing corrodes or
erodes, and everything is eternally, perfectly new.

As we move through the tunnel we feel weightless, free, and
more thrillingly alive than we ever felt for a moment in the finite,
gravity-challenged bodies we left behind. No matter what the circumstances of
our death, there’s a pervasive sense of peace in the awareness that we’re on our
way Home, and we quickly see the legendary white light ahead of us,
indescribably sacred, God’s light.

No matter where on earth we take our last breath, all tunnels
lead to the same entrance to the perfect paradise of the Other Side: a
breathtaking grassy meadow filled with flowers whose colors seem magnified a
thousand times beyond anything we’ll ever experience here. Waiting in that
meadow to joyfully welcome us are loved ones from all our lifetimes on earth and
at Home as well as every animal we’ve ever loved from those same lifetimes.
(Would it be paradise if there were no animals?)

Once we’ve experienced our reunions in the meadow, we proceed
to the triumvirate of buildings—yes, there are buildings—that create the “hub”
of the Other Side. You’ll read more about their specific purposes in the
glossary of terms that follows, without which some of Francine’s celebrity
comments will just be confusing, but for now, in brief, the first three
buildings we see when we return Home are:

The Hall of Wisdom: a
Romanesque structure of gleaming white stone adorned with statuary and
surrounded by fountains and fragrant flowers in constant bloom. Its most
stunning feature is the infinite expanse of marble steps that lead to its
countless entrances.

The Hall of Justice: a pillared
Greco-Roman building with a massive white marble dome. Standing guard at its
entrance is a magnificent statue of Azna, the Mother God. Surrounding the Hall
of Justice are its exquisite Gardens, impeccably designed and extending for as
far as the eye can see, filled with sparkling waterfalls and fountains,
meditation benches, towering trees and canopies of Spanish moss, crystal streams
rushing through carpets of soft green grass, lush forests of ferns, and endless
walls of jewel-tone bougainvillea.

The Hall of Records: a vast
edifice with spectacularly carved columns and a dome of sparkling gold. It is
constantly bustling with “locals” and spirit visitors from earth alike. Inside
stretch an infinite number of aisles, lined with an infinite number of shelves
filled with an infinite number of scrolls, books, documents, maps, artwork,
blueprints, and such, every shelf in perfectly kept order. One of the functions
of the Hall of Records is to house every historical, literary, and artistic work
ever written, drawn, drafted, sketched, or painted since time began, and it is
revered as the sacred home of the Akashic Records, which are the complete
written body of God’s knowledge, laws, and memories.

There are also the Towers, two identical monoliths of blue
glass, glistening from the hushed waterfalls that flow down their facades and
mist the forest of jasmine that lines the path to the Towers’ etched gold
doors.

Through this “formal” entrance we resume the lives we chose
to briefly interrupt for a trip to earth, in the divine world of the Other Side.
And they don’t call it paradise for nothing. The weather is constantly calm and
clear with a temperature of 78 degrees, except on the highest elevations, where
the 30 degree temperature maintains a perfect snowpack. There is no day or
night—no time at all, in fact, beyond an eternal “now.” The sun, moon, and stars
are not visible, and the sky is always the pastel blend of a summer dusk.

The landscape is rich with magnificent libraries, research
centers, schools, houses of worship of every denomination, concert halls and
museums, not to mention stadiums, golf courses, tennis courts, and ski
resorts—in fact, every noncontact sport is enjoyed on the Other Side.

Since money is nonexistent and unnecessary, there is no
commerce and no reason to work for a paycheck. Most of us do work, though, for
the sheer joy and passion of it. We also socialize, as much or as little as we
choose, and because we have no need to eat or sleep, we literally have an
uninterrupted eternity to seek out anyone and everyone we care to know, explore
anything and everything we’ve ever wanted to see, research and learn about any
and every subject and activity that’s ever intrigued us, attend every party,
concert, play, and sports event that interests us, and generally bask in the
bliss of limitless possibilities in a heaven of sacred universal love, respect,
and peace.

We’re free of the earth’s limitations of space and gravity
and the laws of physics. We have houses if we want, wherever we want, and we
create the homes we want by simple thought projection, just as we travel
wherever we want by simply thinking ourselves there.

And how’s this for something to look forward to: not only is
our physical and mental health perfectly restored once we’re Home again, but on
the Other Side all of us are thirty years old. Why thirty? As my Spirit Guide,
Francine, replied when I asked her that question, “Because we are.” Mind you,
the transitions to thirty and to perfect health are usually processes after
we’ve arrived, rather than an instantaneous “Poof! You’re thirty!” effect the
moment we emerge from the tunnel. And when we visit loved ones on earth, we’re
easily able to take on whatever appearance will make us recognizable to them.
After all, if we passed away as an infant or a very elderly person, how
comforting would a spirit visit from a thirty-year-old really be?

I could go on and on about the joy that awaits us after we
leave this world—the same joy we temporarily interrupted to come here for what I
like to call “boot camp.” In fact, I have gone on and
on about it, in a book called Life on the Other Side,
so I’ll leave it at that for this discussion in the hope that these brief
“highlights” will help Francine’s descriptions of the current lives of the
celebrities in this book make much more sense.

But there are other available options for our spirits when
our earthly bodies die, most of them the result of our own choices during our
lifetimes, and since a few of the celebrities we’ll be discussing made those
choices, we should briefly explore those options as well.

THE LEFT
DOOR

Despite what most of us (including me) have been taught since
we were children, there is no such thing as hell. The threat of hell implies a
God so vindictive and unforgiving that He could turn His back on us and banish
us to an eternity away from Him, and not for one minute is that a God I believe
in. The God I believe in, worship, and have committed my life to is all-loving,
all-knowing, all-compassionate, and all-forgiving; He would never turn His back on a life He created.

Sadly, we don’t have to spend much time on earth to learn
that there are those who choose to turn their backs on God. And “choose,” by the
way, excludes anything to do with mental illness or physiological chemical
imbalances, which are completely involuntary. I’m talking about people who,
given a choice between contributing light to this world or contributing
darkness, opt for darkness—the deliberately cruel, amoral, remorseless
sociopaths who view the rest of us as props for their amusement, to be used,
manipulated, and in some form or other destroyed, either physically, mentally,
or emotionally. Darkness can’t exist where there’s light, after all, so the Dark
Side, as I call this segment of society, feels perfectly entitled to the
destruction it inflicts. Its devotees know right from wrong. They just don’t
care. Unlike the misguided or the genuinely lost among us, residents of the Dark
Side can’t be rehabilitated—without a conscience to begin with, they have no
conscience to be guided back to. They can feign charm, compassion, love,
generosity, and often a devout faith in God, not because they mean a word of it,
but because they know how seductive those qualities can be, and it’s so much
easier to destroy someone whose guard is down.

There’s no such thing as action without consequence, for
better or worse, and that’s as true for the Dark Side as it is for the rest of
us. Remember, these dark entities have chosen a path that keeps their backs
turned squarely away from God, and that arrogant rejection of Him prevents them
from experiencing the perfect bliss and love of the Other Side when they die.
Instead, they head straight to a nightmare called the Left Door (which my
granddaughter Angelia used to refer to as “mean heaven” when she was a
child).

The Left Door is the entrance to a joyless, godless world of
nothingness, an abyss through which dark spirits briefly pass before heading
right back in utero for another incarnation that’s likely to be as destructive
as the one they’ve just completed. So when you come across those in this book
who’ve gone through the Left Door, know that within a few months of their death
they were born again on earth with a whole new identity, a whole new incarnation
to live out, with no more of a conscious memory of their past lives than you and
I have, and another opportunity to finally choose light over darkness.

And by the way, just as God doesn’t condemn any of His
children to an eternity of hell, He also doesn’t condemn any of us to an
eternity of recycling through the Left Door and back to earth again and again
and again. Sooner or later (which in the context of eternity might mean hundreds
of years), the spirits on the Other Side will retrieve a dark soul in that
instant before it reaches the Left Door and return it to the healing peace of
Home, where God’s unconditional love is always available, even to those who
don’t reciprocate.

THE HOLDING
PLACE

There’s a kind of anteroom to the Left Door, a desolate gray
expanse filled with lost souls who’ve been separated from their faith, hope, and
joy by oppressive depression. They shuffle silently around in no direction,
heads down, eyes empty and lifeless, never acknowledging each other or the
hopelessness that’s trapped them there.

The Holding Place is like the purgatory I learned about in
parochial school, and it’s sometimes, but not always, the temporary destination
of spirits whose death was caused by suicide. It’s simply not true—in fact, it’s
a cruel lie—that all suicides lead to eternal damnation. Again, God would never
inflict such vindictive judgment on any of His children. Some suicides are
inspired by revenge; others are an ultimate mean-spirited demand for attention
or an act of self-centered cowardice (the latter typical of murder-suicides).
And those particular suicides can look forward to a quick trip through the Left
Door and another immediate incarnation without enjoying a moment of the blissful
peace of Home between lifetimes.

But as we all know, some suicides are the result of mental
illness or untreated chemical imbalances that create severe, crippling,
mind-altering depression, and in the perfection of God’s universal laws no one
is held accountable for actions that aren’t their fault. (Injustice is strictly
a human invention.) A great many of these blameless, unplanned, despair-induced
suicides, I promise you, make it straight through the tunnel to the Other Side.
Others, often confused throughout their lives on earth about their faith in God
and their occasional attraction to the Dark Side, find themselves in the Holding
Place, where, if they can overcome the desolation around them, they can still
choose between the doomed cycle of the Left Door or Home, where God’s embrace
will always be waiting for them.

GHOSTS

And then there are those who, when their bodies die, refuse
to acknowledge the tunnel or see it and reject it. This leaves their spirits
stranded here, outside of their bodies, stuck between the lower vibrational
level of earth and the much higher vibrational dimension of the Other Side, not
one bit aware that they’ve died. And that’s how ghosts are created.

Ghosts, or earthbounds, are tragic, fascinating beings. As
far as they’re concerned, they’re every bit as alive as the rest of us, and
everything is exactly and perpetually as it was at the moment of their death,
from their surroundings to their age, health (or lack of it), and scars, wounds,
or visible signs of injuries that might have killed them. The one thing that’s
changed, which often makes them desperately confused, if not downright cranky,
is that because they’ve changed vibrational frequencies without knowing it, the
people around them suddenly seem to act as if they don’t exist.

There’s nothing haphazard about some spirits’ determination
to remain earthbound. Ghosts stay behind for a variety of misguided reasons—to
care for a loved one, to protect a home or land they’re deeply connected to, to
seek revenge, or, with sad frequency, to avoid facing God out of fear that He’ll
turn them away (which is an impossibility).

No ghost is ever trapped on earth for eternity. Some of them
are sent to the Other Side by people who are compassionate and educated enough,
when they find themselves in the presence of an earthbound, to simply say,
“You’re dead. Go Home.” (Sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn’t, but
it’s worth a try.) Many more of them are eventually rescued by residents of the
Other Side, who are well aware of them and can be counted on to perform
persistent interventions for as long as it takes to pull these trapped, confused
souls into the tunnel and on to the joyful peace that’s waiting for them in
God’s outstretched arms.